e man himself whom she was going to see--his bow
and his smile, his teeth and his mustache, and the perfect fit of his
clothes. One point in regard to him was still vague in her mind, and as
to that her doubts were soon resolved. One evening she said to her
father:

"Did you ever see Captain Farnham?"

"Now, what a foolish question that is I'd like to know who built his
greenhouses, ef I didn't?"

"He is pretty well off, ain't he?"

Saul laughed with that satisfied arrogance of ignorant men when they
are asked a question they can answer easily.

"I rather guess he is; that is, ef you call three, four, five millions
well off. I don't know how it strikes you" (with a withering sarcasm),
"but _I_ call Arthur Farnham pretty well fixed."

These words ran in Maud's brain with a ravishing sound. She built upon
them a fantastic palace of mist and cloud. When at last her dress was
finished and she started, after three unsuccessful attempts, to walk to
Algonquin Avenue, she was in no condition to do herself simple justice.
She hardly knew whether she wanted a place in the library, a clerkship
at Washington, or the post of amanuensis to the young millionaire. She
was confused by his reception of her; his good-natured irony made her
feel ill at ease; she was nervous and flurried; and she felt, as she
walked away, that the battle had gone against her.

III.

THE WIDOW AND HER DAUGHTER.

Mrs. Belding's house was next to that of Mr. Farnham, and the
neighborly custom of Algonquin Avenue was to build no middle walls of
partition between adjoining lawns. A minute's walk, therefore, brought
the young man to the door of Mrs. Belding's cottage. She called it a
cottage, and so we have no excuse for calling it anything else, though
it was a big three-storied house, built of the soft creamy stone of the
Buffland quarries, and it owed its modest name to an impression in the
lady's mind that gothic gables and dormer windows were a necessary
adjunct of cottages. She was a happy woman, though she would have been
greatly surprised to hear herself so described. She had not been out of
mourning since she was a young girl. Her parents, as she sometimes
said, "had put her into black"; and several children had died in
infancy, one after the other, until at last her husband, Jairus
Belding, the famous bridge-builder, had perished of a malarial fever
caught in the swamps of the Wabash, and left her with one daughter and
a large tin